Locating VSTs

PolarityMan

So I accidentally reset my VST search path in reaper last night while trying to get a plugin to install. Does anyone know how to locate all fodlers contianing a VST plugin?

80% are in the default locations but there are a bunch of others scattered about the place and dont want to miss anything ideally. 

WiresDreamDisasters

Windows 7/10 32bit - C:\Program Files (x86)\VSTPlugIns
Windows 7/10 64bit - C:\Program Files\VSTPlugIns or C:\Program Files\Steinberg\VSTPlugIns

Those are the usual ones. If you've got custom ones, then it is anyone's guess!!!

Cirrus

My strategy would be the lazy one - load up a session, make a list of plugins that are reported missing, go and search for them.

PolarityMan

WiresDreamDisasters said:

Windows 7/10 32bit - C:\Program Files (x86)\VSTPlugIns
Windows 7/10 64bit - C:\Program Files\VSTPlugIns or C:\Program Files\Steinberg\VSTPlugIns

Those are the usual ones. If you've got custom ones, then it is anyone's guess!!!

Yeah I have the default ones but there are some plugins that use customer dirs and I foolishly didnt override them whle installing. Think I got them all jsut by browsing the file system but wondered if there was some tool that could look through dlls and look to see if they had the right exported symbols. 

octatonic

Search the system for "VSTPlugIns" and you should find them all.

Chris_J

Once you've got them all again, copy the file path list and save it somewhere. When I bought a new pc it took me ages to find everything and don't want to go through it again.

Musicwolf

Cirrus said:

My strategy would be the lazy one - load up a session, make a list of plugins that are reported missing, go and search for them.

Funnily enough that happened to me this afternoon after loading up a project started in Cubase 10 but I’m now on 10.5.

PolarityMan

Chris_J said:

Once you've got them all again, copy the file path list and save it somewhere. When I bought a new pc it took me ages to find everything and don't want to go through it again.

I did exactly that! All my installers are on a entwork drive too

Snap

Obvious question, but first of all, do you know how to search your system for something? 

PolarityMan

Yeah but there's quite a few .dll files that arent vsts

Snap

Couldn't you just narrow it down by the VSTs you are after, assuming you know the names of them? On the face of it, doesn't seem to be too trciky to solve.

PolarityMan

I just went through all the liekly fodlers in the end but I have quite a lot of vsts that I've built up over the years. Getting the big hitter like waves, fabfilter, soundtoys, plugin alliance etc gets most of them but theres lots of random freebies and stuff Ive picked up on cheap deals over the years and was wanting to try to catch them all before discovering they were missing when I happen to open an old project.

Given that the .dll files should be easy to identify I would have thought that there was a utility already around that could do it tbh, probably something as simple as running strings and looking for the API entry points would have been sufficient but did it manually in the end. 

Snap

One way to do it is to point your DAW to the whole of the drive when it looks for VSTs. That absolutely would catch them all. I do this on an external drive that has a load of stuff on it. The drive is labelled F: and that directory is in the settings of the DAW for VSTs